A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery)

by Elkins, Aaron

  “The craquelure—it’s not the same!” she exclaimed. “These are two different paintings!”

  “That’s it,” Ted said, smiling. “The greatest forger in the world—and Weisskopf would be a prime candidate—might be able to duplicate every color and stroke of a painting, but there’s no way he could possibly reproduce those thousands of intersecting networks of cracks. And… he didn’t.”

  He explained that the photograph they were looking at now, the one in which the craquelure didn’t match the auction catalog’s version, had been taken more than half a century ago, in 1947, when the painting had been lent by its then-owner to the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris to celebrate its reopening after the war, following its years as a storage house for Goering’s looted art. The first photo, the one that did match the one in the catalog, had been taken only last year, when the Papadakises’ St. Barts home had been the subject of a photo spread in Architectural Digest.

  “In other words—” Ted said.

  “In other words, sometime between 1947, when Panos didn’t own it, and 2011, when he did, the real one was replaced by a fake. Ted, that’s absolutely brilliant—the craquelure. I’ve never heard of a fake identified that way before.”

  “Thank you. I read about somebody doing it years ago, but this was my first shot at it. The thing is, it’s almost never something you can use. The original has to be an old painting to start with, old enough to develop the cracks, and the fake has to be a copy of that specific picture, not just a painting intended to look generally like the work of some artist, and—this is the hardest part: There have to be high-quality photographs of both the original and the copy. Once you have all that, it’s easy.”

  “Well, I’m still impressed. But what we still don’t know is when the real Manet was replaced with the copy. It might have been after Panos had it, but it might also have been before then—anytime between 1947 and when he bought it, which we think was in 1997. Fifty years.”

  “Wrong; we do know. Jamie turned up a few other photographs, one of which is from another catalog—2002—when Panos put it up for sale at a Bern auction house but withdrew it when he didn’t get his reserve price. And that photo doesn’t match the one in our catalog, which means it’s still the original. So…”

  Again she finished Ted’s thought for him. “So the substitution wasn’t made until 2002 or later, well after he bought it. Wow, we’re getting someplace. Okay, next question: Did Panos himself have it faked for some nefarious motive, who knows what, or was he himself the victim of some slick forger who’d taken it away for cleaning or restoration and returned the fake in its place?” (Someone like You Know Who, she thought but didn’t say, although she knew Ted had to be thinking the same thing.)

  He didn’t say it either. “Well, being that Panos is Panos, my money is on his being the doer. Some people just aren’t the victim type.”

  “That I agree with, but whoever did it, what I keep asking myself is how it’s possible that the lab in Lyons didn’t spot a fake of a hundred-and-fifty-year-old painting. They’re the best there is. Could somebody there have been, what do you guys call it, ‘compromised’?”

  “Beats me; I don’t have an answer to that either. Yet.”

  “And there’s something else that doesn’t hold up for me, Ted. How much would Panos have made from auctioning off the fake? Maybe ten million dollars, right?”

  He nodded. “A mere pittance.”

  “But that’s my point. For Panos it is a mere pittance.”

  He had been slowly rotating the Coke can on the table, but now his eyes came up to meet hers. “Why would you say that?”

  “Well, everything about him. The yacht alone. It’s a palace. He paid fifty-nine million dollars for it, so he must—”

  “Not exactly. It cost fifty-nine million, which is a different thing. Panos has managed to pay seven-and-a-half million so far. And his payments are currently five months in arrears. The bank is threatening to take it back.”

  She blinked. “Oh. But the toys—that speedboat, the staff, the man’s whole lifestyle…”

  “That’s the problem, his burn rate. He’s spending way more than he’s taking in.”

  “All right, what about all those multimillion-dollar homes he’s supposed to own? In St. Barts, in New York, in—”

  “He doesn’t own any multimillion-dollar homes, he owns four multimillion-dollar mortgages. The one home he does own is a stone two-roomer in his home village, and he inherited that. And that fabulous art collection of his? He’s underwater there too; he owes more on it than it’s worth. From what we can tell, every single painting he does own outright is in this auction—and maybe some that he doesn’t. He needs money, big-time.”

  This was such an overwhelmingly new take on Panos that it took her a few moments to digest it, and she still couldn’t quite accept it. “Well, what about his big fractional investment scam? He’s got to be raking in money on that. Why would he be doing it if he wasn’t? And these are multimillion-dollar paintings they’re investing in, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, they are, but at root the whole thing is a pyramid scheme, a Ponzi scheme, and it has the same flaw as every other Ponzi scheme. And in the end it’s always a fatal flaw.”

  “You know, Ted, I hate to admit it, but I’m still not altogether clear on the ins and outs of this scheme. What’s the fatal flaw?”

  Panos’s idea, he told her patiently, was to sell “shares” in a painting that he would wisely buy and later sell for a supposedly sizable profit—generally 20 percent or so, he told his investors. Put in a million, get back a million two hundred thousand. And the man delivered again and again, sometimes in only a month or two. With that kind of result, most of his investors dismissed their misgivings about such consistently prodigious returns, took their profits, and eagerly left the principal, that original million bucks or whatever, in the fund for the next killing. So all Panos had to worry about ever forking out were the earnings that they expected; he still had the original million. Actually, he had a lot more than that because some of the shares they were buying didn’t exist, except in Panos’s mind and his bank account. That is, he would sell a 120 or 130 percent of each painting if he could get it, and, of course, keep the extra 20 or 30 percent for himself.

  The catch, of course, was that it was impossible to keep this up indefinitely, so what Panos was doing, and this was the very essence of a Ponzi scheme, was using the principal from new investors to pay the older ones their “profits.” As long as he could keep bringing in willing new suckers, things chugged right along, but when the economy sputtered and there weren’t as many rich new suckers as before, he reached the stage of having too many older clients to pay and not enough new clients to cover them. And it all started to go bust.

  “The fatal flaw,” Ted repeated. “From what we’ve been able to put together, that’s where he’s at now and he’s hoping this auction brings in enough at least to get him right with his investors so he can bail out before he gets caught. Otherwise he’s headed for a Madoff-level fall and he knows it. So… an extra ten million bucks or so isn’t chicken feed to him.”

  Alix had sipped her drink and listened carefully while he’d explained. “Wow,” she said quietly. “I had no idea. You’d never know from looking at him, would you? He looks as if he’s on top of the world.”

  “You wouldn’t be much of a con man if you couldn’t pull that off.”

  The counterman now showed up at the table with knives, forks, paper plates, and a wad of paper napkins, went back to the oven, shoveled out a pizza, deftly sliced it, not into pie-shaped wedges, but into squares, or as near as the pizza’s curving rim would allow, and brought it to their table. He looked proudly down at his steaming creation, affectionately down at his customers, and used both arms to make an encouraging gesture. They smiled their thanks, but he remained waiting, whistling under his breath, until they each took a piece, tasted it, and m-m-m-ed how very good it was. Satisfied, he retired.

&nb
sp; “It’s… interesting,” Ted said to Alix and sniffed at the slice he held. “Different.”

  “Different,” Alix agreed.

  “Anyway,” Ted continued, “we now have a lot of things going on here, coming together. We have a murdered forger, a probably murdered purser, a slashed Manet, a forged Manet—”

  “Correction, make that a forged, slashed Manet,” Alix said. “There’s still a real Manet out there somewhere, presumably unslashed.”

  “That’s right, and let’s not forget the faked Monet; that’s another thing. And by no means let us forget the Ponzi scheme, rapidly shrinking in relative importance, that brought us here in the first place.” He shook his head. “Alix, I’ve never claimed to have a connoisseur’s eye, but I do have a pretty good record when it comes to sizing up situations and circumstances. There’s no way all this is merely coincidental. It’s all tied up together somehow, and if Panos doesn’t have his finger in every piece of this pie, I’ll eat my hat. Or turn in my badge; whichever comes first.”

  “You’re not saying he’s actually a murderer, are you? Or are you?”

  “No,” he said with a laugh, “I might be thinking it, but I’m not saying it. I need some evidence before I crawl that far out on a limb. I don’t trust my intuition quite as unreservedly as you do yours. But I am saying he’s involved, he knows what’s going on, he’s in the middle of it all.”

  That didn’t compute for Alix. She could see why Panos—and probably quite a few others—might want to get rid of Donny, who knew too much and talked too much, but why kill Weisskopf, his bread and butter when it came to creating the forgeries? Had Weisskopf been blackmailing him, perhaps? No, Weisskopf was hardly in a position to go to the police or anyone else. She was just putting these thoughts into order and raising the Coke can to her lips when a thought came to her so suddenly that she set the can back down with a clunk that made the counterman jump.

  “Ted, you’re definitely right, at least about a part of it. I just realized. He did know the Manet was a fake! Before I said anything, I mean.”

  Ted put down the slice he’d had in his hand and gave her his full attention.

  “I was talking to Edward just a little while ago,” she told him. “He said that before the cruise started, when he’d begun to break the news to Panos that the lab identified the Monet as a fake, Panos had assumed he was talking about the Manet. Edward thought it was just that Panos couldn’t keep the names straight, but I think—”

  “So do I,” Ted said with animation. “He knew it was a fake, all right, and he was planning to auction it as the real thing. And… I’m thinking out loud here… when Panos found out that you were raising doubts about it—”

  “Probably from Edward; he was on his way up to the reception right after I opened my big mouth.”

  “Possibly so.”

  “He figured that he’d better get it out of sight before I came up with some solid evidence, and mutilating it was the best way of doing that right then and there.”

  “Yes. He loses money on the auction, but he still gets the insurance. And of course, he still has the original to sell too; that is, if he hasn’t already sold it.”

  Ted was nodding along with her. “I like it. It adds up. But what I don’t get is why he would’ve been in such a hurry. Why didn’t he wait? I mean, I know he didn’t want to leave it out there for you to scrutinize at your leisure, but why do it when you were standing right there and he had to deal with you? That was risky.”

  “Oh, that’s obvious. I figured that out a long time ago.”

  His left eyebrow went up. “Did you now?”

  “The reason he was in a hurry,” Alix said serenely, “was so that it could logically be blamed on one of the reception people—and there were something like a hundred of them. If he’d waited till they’d left, it’d be down to the very few people still on the ship, which would include him.”

  The suspended eyebrow came down. “Okay, I like that too. But if you figured it out so long ago, would you mind telling me why you waited till now to mention it?”

  “Well, all right, technically speaking, I guess I didn’t exactly figure it out, but I did think about it as a possible scenario.”

  “All right, then, let me ask you about another possible scenario you may have thought about. You’ve gotten to know Mrs. Papadakis a little. What do you think the chances are that she knows about all this? That maybe she’s involved?”

  The question surprised her. “Gaby? Zilch. I doubt if she’s even aware of the financial troubles he’s in. Besides, I can’t see Panos letting her in on it. This is a woman who wears her heart on her sleeve. She’d be rotten at being cagey and evasive and all. And I think, down deep, well, I just think she’s a good person. Certainly not a crook. And definitely not a killer.”

  “Okay,” Ted said noncommittally. He ate a little more, started to say something, thought again about how to say it, and finally got it out. “Alix, things have changed. People are getting killed now. So you need to understand that amateur time is over. As of now, you’d better consider yourself off the case.”

  “Is that an order, boss?” she shot back. “Don’t I at least get a notice of separation?” That “amateur time” had stung. A few seconds ago, he was still interested in her opinions.

  “Think of it as a favor,” he said no less sharply and then softened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t put it very well. You’ve done a terrific job already, more than we could have expected. You’ve been a huge help.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “No, I couldn’t be more serious. I mean it. But this has morphed into something completely different from what we started with. Forget the fractional investment thing. This has turned into a major international operation now, and to your credit, it all stems directly from your identification of the fake Manet.”

  “One fake makes a major international operation?”

  “No, it’s more than that—”

  “You mean the Monet forgery too? What, is there some kind of… of international forgery ring? Are there really such things, and not just in the movies?”

  He smiled and looked inscrutable. “You said all that, not me. I’ve said all I’m going to say about it, which is more than I should have, so please forget it. Let’s just say it’s bigger than you thought—or I did, for that matter—and at this point, the investment scheme is on the back burner. For the moment, I’m working on something else, and you’re not working on anything. Just do what you’re supposed to be doing for Panos and go along for the ride. Just—”

  “Keep a low profile.”

  “Right.”

  “Tread carefully.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Ted, something else just occurred to me. Too bad I’m off the case, because it’s something you really might want to put in the hopper.”

  “Well, since you thought of it during a meal the FBI is paying for, I guess, technically, you’re still on. Let’s hear it.”

  “It’s this: Since Panos immediately jumped to the assumption that Edward was talking about the Manet when he told him there was a forgery, then can’t we conclude, by implication, that he hadn’t been aware that the Monet was a fake too? That it came as a surprise to him? In other words, that he’s not the only one making forgeries of his collection?”

  “That is a very good point,” he said, chewing thoughtfully on a gob of salami, green pepper, prosciutto, and cheese.

  “And, if you’ll allow it, I believe I can solve another mystery for you.”

  He waited.

  “Cheese,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She waved a pizza slice. “It’s feta, not mozzarella or provolone or anything like that. That’s why it tastes different. And smells different.”

  “Ah,” he said, “you’re right. You did it again.” He lifted the Coke can in toast. “The connoisseur’s nose.”

  22

  The rest of the day, her third aboard the Artemis, was blessedly unev
entful. Edward was waiting at the start of her informal chat session with an offer to assist, and she happily delegated to him all questions about value potential, financial trends, and the like. They were now only two days from the auction, which was scheduled for the following night, on the way from Corfu to Rhodes, so interest in the paintings had increased. All of the guests showed up wanting to hear what she could tell them about one painting or painter or another, and most stayed the full two hours, following her around as she answered others’ questions. Fortunately for her, most of the questions about the contemporary works fell into Edward’s province, so she happily spent her time in the music room, talking about things she knew.

  People continued to hang around and engage her well into the cocktail hour, and it was only afterward, when she was dressing for dinner, that she realized what a welcome interlude it had been, a kind of minivacation from thoughts and theories and suspicions of murder and forgery.

  On her way back to her stateroom to dress for dinner, she saw Ted and Yiorgos leaning on a railing, head to head. Now, what was that about—the undercover FBI agent powwowing with the Hellenic Police lieutenant colonel? Did that qualify as a “major international operation”? She jerked her head, refusing to waste her time thinking about it. Not her affair. She was off the case.

  At dinner, the first sit-down meal she’d attended, held in the small-scale owner’s dining room, it was harder to keep the morbid thoughts at bay, what with Panos ostentatiously presiding as jovially as if he had nothing on his conscience, or, more likely, no conscience at all. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. Vulgar, petty, cunning… but a killer? Easy enough to see him as a crook, a con man, an all-around scoundrel; he would have been perfect in an old Errol Flynn swashbuckler as a fat, villainous alcalde or a rouged, scheming courtier, but central casting would have laughed him out of the studio at the idea of his playing a murderer. He just didn’t look the type.

  On the other hand, who did?

  The bartender must have done a good business at the cocktail party because everybody was visibly loosened up, and there was plenty of laughter and chatter as they took their assigned seats. Alix’s place card—like the others, in a holder the base of which was a silver model of the yacht (“Please accept this miniature Artemis as a memento of your voyage”)—put her at a corner, between Gaby at the end of the table and Edward on her right. Panos was at the head, not easily in her line of sight, which was fine with her.